The Family He Should Have Had (and how it would have changed his life)
by FoxQuill
Summary: In a world where Remus Lupin goes with Sirius Black to visit the Potters on Halloween in 1981 and sends a patronus to Dumbledore before they search for Peter Pettigrew, little Harry Potter is left in the capable hands of a tiny, strange little family that loves him.
In a world where Remus Lupin goes with Sirius Black to visit the Potters on Halloween in 1981, in a world where Remus is rational, and sends a patronus to Dumbledore before they search for Peter Pettigrew, in a world where they reach Peter at the same time as three others from the Order of the Phoenix, Peter Pettigrew is arrested and taken to Azkaban, and little Harry Potter is left in the capable care of his godfather and stand-in uncle.

Ten years later, they receive the first acceptance letter that Dumbledore sends, and they go to Diagon Alley immediately. They chat to Tom for a while (he's Harry's favourite person because he can tell wonderful stories), they meet Deadalus Diggle, whom Harry has met once before, and is nearly always in the pub, and they don't meet Professor Quirrell. They also don't meet a pale, blond boy in Madam Malkin's robe shop, but they get the same slightly ominous warning from the funny old man Ollivander, who says that the only other feather this Phoenix gave was in Voldemort's wand. Harry's skin prickles a little, but he wants this wand with the rare core because he likes Phoenixes, especially the one that sometimes comes with Dumbledore when they meet.

In a world where Harry is brought up by a dog and a wolf, they both take him to Kings Cross Station on the first of September, but they exclaim with happy surprise when they bump into a clan of red hair and excitable children, two of whom are identical, and especially excited to meet Harry Potter himself. The youngest boy is Harry's age, and they share a compartment on the train because Padfoot says that the Weasley's are the best sort of wizards, and Ron seems to be an excellent example of this, because he has an hour long discussion with Harry about quidditch. The only two interruptions are the trolley-lady (Harry buys everything because Moony isn't here to remind him to be pragmatic), and a girl with big hair, who arrives just as Ron attempts some magic. She scoffs at the dud spell and cleans Harry's glasses with a flick of a wand, and when she says that he's in history books, he grins and says that they have a scrapbook with all his written appearances.

When they get to the sorting ceremony, he doesn't refuse Slytherin because Remus brought him up to be open minded, but he asks for Gryffindor because Sirius told him all about his parents and their house. He can feel his parents in the common room, in the warmth and love of his housemates. The bushy-haired and intelligent-eyed Hermione Granger has his mother's brains, and the red-head, freckled Ron Weasley has his father's loyalty. And of course, there are always some things you can't share without ending up liking each other, and knocking out a twelve-foot mountain troll will always be one of them. They clump together and become a trio, just as much as the Marauders were a quartet, and Harry neglects to mention the mortal danger he was in when he writes home to Remus.

Harry gets onto the quidditch team because he hates Draco Malfoy and he loves flying, so when Malfoy flies up with Neville Longbottom's remembrall, it doesn't take a second thought before Harry is flying at him like a dart, and it's easy enough to catch a glass globe that's flying through bright daylight in a lazy, calculable arc when he's spent dim, dusky evenings peering through shadows to find a tiny glint of a golden snitch darting unpredictably. When McGonagall takes him to Wood, Harry writes home straight away, and Sirius sends Harry's Nimbus Two Thousand by owl.

He hates Snape almost as much as Sirius did, because Snape sees not only James in him, but also two more of his childhood tormentors, and when Harry writes an indignant letter home about it, he gets a month of detentions because Sirius sends Snape a howler behind Remus' back. These detentions take place in the dungeons, and are presided over by Snape for approximately ten minutes before he disappears, but not before threatening to dock five hundred points from Gryffindor if Harry's work isn't complete by the time he returns. The lack of supervision means Harry has visitors, first of all from Slytherins who are innocently trying to find a spare classroom to work in, and then from those who want to peek and sneer at the new resident celebrity. Harry ignores them until a boy with dark skin and darker hair introduces himself by his first name, and then drags along a quiet, pale girl the next week. Blaise and Daphne keep him company from exactly three minutes after Snape leaves, until one minute before he comes back, every week without fail.

Ron is wary of his new friends, but Hermione is delighted because he's 'mending links destroyed by the inter house rivalry caused by quidditch'. While Harry doesn't agree with her about quidditch, he does agree with her about unity. Plus, Zabini and Greengrass were never the most extreme of pure-blood families—the Zabini family wasn't even part of the sacred twenty-eight—and their company is the only thing that stops Harry from attempting to hex Snape into the next century (Sirius would probably congratulate him if he did). The two Slytherins prove to be extremely helpful when they're trying to work out who Nicholas Flamel (mentioned by Hagrid, who always has time for a chat with Harry about Remus and Sirius) is because Daphne suggest immediately that they look in the restricted section because of how he reactued, and Blaise joins Harry under his Dad's cloak (snuck into his trunk by Sirius when he thought Remus wasn't looking) and somehow knows which books are the wrong ones to open. He says his family have similar looking books in their library at home. They don't find Flamel, but Harry finds the Mirror of Erised when he takes a wrong turn on the way back up from leaving Blaise at the dungeons, and works out what it means because of Remus' fondness for muggle dingbats and puzzles, and really, mirror writing isn't hard to work out. He sits with his parents for a long while, and when he tells Ron, he isn't surprised that the other boy sees something different.

On Christmas Harry receives plenty of gifts from Ron and Hermione, but also from Blaise, Daphne, and his own two adoptive parents. He still is the only non-Weasley to get a Weasley jumper, because Remus and Sirius have been spending every weekend over at the Burrow, and because he's the one whom Ron mentions the most in his letters to his mother. Harry eats with the Weasleys, plays wizards chess in the Gryffindor common room, but also darts down to the dungeons to give Blaise the package of sweets that had arrived from the Honeydukes catalogue. He returns to the room where the Mirror of Erised is stored, to say goodbye to his family, and to spend Christmas with them just once. He resolutely tells himself that it is the last time he'll come looking for the magical mirror, and it is.

When the girls come back, Harry eats his last chocolate frog left over from his Christmas presents from home and shouts when he gets Dumbledore. Blaise and Daphne come running over to the Gryffindor table because they want to know what's going on, and then they all run to Gryffindor tower where Hermione drags a huge book down from her dormitory to flick through and find the information they need. The two first years with green sewn in their robes are given suspicious looks, but the group of five is two busy with their heads crowded over the page to notice.

They don't find where the stone is hidden until much later, because Harry has undercover agents in the Slytherin common room, who tell him that Malfoy was plotting in the common room the night before, and so he scoffs at the wizards' duel, fully aware that Malfoy isn't planning to turn up. The three Gryffindors get stuck on the stairs with Neville Longbottom, who found them sneaking out to find the Slytherins, and end up on the third floor, running away from Mrs Norris just the same because she gets everywhere, and doesn't need a tip off to find students out of bed. Hermione unlocks the door, Ron and Neville run in, and Harry doesn't tell them what's behind them because Filch is outside and Harry can hold his nerve; he's learned from the best. As soon as Filch is gone, however, Neville turns and sags against the door, and screams at the sight of the three heads drooling. They all sprint back to the tower, but Harry, with quick eyes, and Hermione, with a quick mind, have seen the trapdoor and guess what's under it. Ron still calls them mental for noticing it, but Harry has had to notice things because he grew up with two of the most infamous tricksters Hogwarts have ever known.

It's Blaise who hears his head of house threatening Professor Quirrell, and Daphne who wrangles information from Hagrid, but after a month of detentions from McGonagall because Hagrid somehow got a baby dragon called Norbert and Draco followed Blaise and Daphne from the dungeons before getting the teacher, it's still Harry who realises how suspicious it is that someone 'Greek chappie' just happened to be at the Hog's Head with a dragon egg and goes off to interrogate him.

When Harry, Ron, and Hermione return, looking for Dumbledore, Blaise says he just saw him leaving the grounds, and the groups take a detour to grab the invisibility cloak before heading straight to the third floor. Neville is waiting for them, and Hermione frets about the ethics, but Daphne is cool and calm and casts the body-bind curse with an apology.

Harry dodges Peeves with tricks from the Marauders themselves and when they get to Fluffy's room, Blaise plays the flute that Harry got from Hagrid because Harry has no idea how to. The Devil's Snare still catches them off guard, and Ron still bellows at Hermione when she forgets magic. Daphne is the one who spots that the flying things are keys, and with five of them, it's easy to trap the one that Harry spots has a crushed wing. Ron plays them through the games of chess, and Blaise stays with him when the queen smashes him to the floor. Hermione and Daphne follow Harry into the room with the potions, and both jump when the flames spring up in the doorways. Hermione figures out the riddle and Harry drinks the potion to progress before either of the girls can protest, telling them to take the other bottle which has enough for both of them.

Harry is just as shocked when Professor Quirrell is the one standing in front of the mirror. But when the voice from the back of Quirrell's head says 'use the boy', Harry knows he must lie, and knows how to lie. He has been taught to lie by Sirius Black and Remus Lupin, and by the tricks and pranks played in their house that required a set up and denial of all knowledge afterwards. He knows that the best lies are based on truth, and so, even as he feels the stone slip heavy into his pocket, he describes what he saw that first night he found the mirror, his family stretched out behind him. He almost gets away with it. But experience has told him to use everything to his advantage, and when Quirrell grabs his hand to pull him back in front of the mirror, he sees the wince and the quick pull away. Even as the last fold of cloth falls from the Professor's head, revealing the horrifying half-being that a dim part of his brain recognises as Voldemort, Harry lunges at the man (men?), hands outstretched, and presses them onto any skin he can reach. He doesn't ask why his touch makes the man scream in such agony, but he knows that magic works in strange ways sometimes. The pain in his head grows, and he just has enough rational thought to know that Voldemort has escaped, somehow.

He wakes up in the hospital wing with a pile of sweets and a howler on the bedside table. Dumbledore is sat on the end of the bed, and Harry talks with him for a while, but not for too long because there's a dangerous red envelope on the table, and Harry knows who it's from, and also that he has to open it. The howler shouting at the rows of empty hospital beds in Remus' voice about how Harry should not get ideas from his godfather and this was not a way to behave and well done for not dying but don't you dare do anything like this again does not endear him to Madam Pomfrey, who requires a lot of pestering before four first years come tumbling through the door, two in red and two in green. They gabble for as long as is allowed to them before the matron comes waving her arms and chasing them out.

The next day Hagrid comes and cries next to Harry's bed, and then produces a photo album of his parents, saying that even though he had photos at home, these were photos Harry could have for himself, and all his parents' friends had sent some, even Sirius and Remus themselves.

Harry is allowed to go to the feast, and the hangings are green, which doesn't really matter because Harry survived Voldemort for the second time and he's just glad that happened, but then Dumbledore awards twenty points each to Blaise and Daphne, one for helping friends and the other for having a sharp eye; sixty to Ron for the best played game of chess Hogwarts has ever seen; sixty to Hermione for cool logic in the face of fire; and seventy to Harry for pure nerve and outstanding courage. And then, he gives Neville fifteen points and there's a stampede because that means Gryffindor has won.

That first year, Harry accepts the extra points because he thinks he deserves them but he sees the faces of his two friends at the Slytherin table and it's not the victory he thought it would be. He's still ecstatic, though, and the celebrations in Gryffindor Tower lasts most of the night.

Harry leaves Hogwarts with a full compartment; invitations from Ron, Blaise, and Daphne; a promise to write and phone from Hermione; and the bubbly feeling of friends. Sirius and Remus are waiting on the platform next to Molly Weasley and Ginny Weasley, and Harry's sadness at leaving Hogwarts is dampened by the knowledge that he would have a great summer full of magic, and return to Hogwarts and his friends in September.


End file.
